Indian agent James McLaughlin dies

Author

Website Name

Year Published

Title

URL

Access Date

March 31, 2015

Publisher

A+E Networks

Best known today for his inadvertent role in the death of Sitting Bull, the prominent Indian agent James McLaughlin dies in Washington, D.C.

Unlike some Indian agents of the later 19th century, McLaughlin genuinely liked and respected his charges. His wife was half Sioux, and she taught her husband to speak her native language reasonably well. In 1871, this valuable skill won McLaughlin a position at the Devils Lake Indian Agency in Dakota Territory and he eventually became the chief agent.

At Devils Lake, McLaughlin gained a reputation for fair and sympathetic treatment of Indians. His appreciation for Indians was strictly limited, however. Like most Indian agents of the day, McLaughlin believed that his mission was to “civilize” the Indians by forcing them to adopt white ways. McLaughlin viewed traditional Indian practices like the Sun Dance and buffalo hunting as obstacles to the inevitable assimilation of the Native Americans into white society. Thus, while he worked hard to improve Indian living conditions, he simultaneously tried to stamp out their culture by promoting the use of English and the adoption of sedentary farming.

In 1881, McLaughlin was transferred to the larger Sioux reservation at Standing Rock, South Dakota. Two years later, the great Sioux Chief Sitting Bull was assigned to the reservation. McLaughlin worried about Sitting Bull. The chief was infamous for his role in the defeat of Custer’s 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. He was also among the last of the Sioux to accept confinement to a reservation, and his disdain for white ways was well known.

For several years, McLaughlin and Sitting Bull enjoyed a strained but peaceful relationship. In 1890, however, a popular religious movement known as the Ghost Dance swept through the Standing Rock reservation. The Ghost Dancers believed that an apocalyptic day was approaching when all whites would be wiped out, the buffalo would return, and the Indians could return to their traditional ways.

McLaughlin wrongly suspected that Sitting Bull was a leader of the Ghost Dance movement. In December 1890, he ordered the arrest of the old chief, believing this might calm the tense situation on the reservation. Unfortunately, during the arrest, a fight broke out and McLaughlin’s policemen killed Sitting Bull. The murder only exacerbated the climate of fear and mistrust, which contributed to the tragic massacre of 146 Indians by U.S. soldiers at Wounded Knee later that month.

In 1895, McLaughlin moved to Washington, D.C., where he became an inspector for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He eventually became familiar with Indians all around the nation, leading him to write a 1910 memoir entitled, My Friend the Indian. He died in Washington in 1923 at the age of 81 and was buried at the South Dakota reservation town that bears his name.

Also on this day

Following its ratification by the necessary three-quarters of U.S. states, the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing to African Americans citizenship and all its privileges, is officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution.
Two years after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, where new state governments,...

Colonel Paul Dudley Sargent with the 16th Continental Regiment and Colonel Israel Hutchinson with his 27th Continental Regiment, both from Massachusetts, as well as several British ships, arrive at Horn’s Hook, New York, on this day in 1776.
Horn’s Hook was first intended to house nine guns as a Patriot battery...

The Italian race car driver Tazio Nuvolari wins the greatest victory of his career in the Grosser Preis von Deutschland (German Grand Prix) held on the Nurburgring racetrack in Nurburg, Germany on this day in 1935.
Known to his fans as “Il Montavano Volante,” or the Flying Mantuan, for his...

On this day in 1864, at the Battle of Ezra Church, Georgia, Confederates under General John Bell Hood make a third attempt to break General William T. Sherman’s hold on Atlanta. Like the first two, this attack failed, destroying the Confederate Army of Tennessee’s offensive capabilities.
Hood had replaced Joseph...

In a ringing declaration indicating that America’s pre-World War II isolation was truly at an end, the U.S. Senate approves the charter establishing the United Nations. In the years to come, the United Nations would be the scene of some of the most memorable Cold War confrontations between the United...

Maximo Menendez falls into a coma immediately after drinking a Colombian soft drink, Pony Malta de Bavaria, in Miami, Florida. Drinking half the bottle before heading off to his job at a pet shop, Menendez remarked, “This is poisoned–it’s bad stuff,” before going into convulsions. The next day, officials at...

A United States military plane crashes into the Empire State Building on this day in 1945, killing 14 people. The freak accident was caused by heavy fog.
The B-25 Mitchell bomber, with two pilots and one passenger aboard, was flying from New Bedford, Massachusetts, to LaGuardia Airport in New York...

During the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover orders the U.S. Army under General Douglas MacArthur to evict by force the Bonus Marchers from the nation’s capital.Two months before, the so-called “Bonus Expeditionary Force,” a group of some 1,000 World War I veterans seeking cash payments for their veterans’ bonus certificates,...

At 3:42 a.m., an earthquake measuring between 7.8 and 8.2 magnitude on the Richter scale flattens Tangshan, a Chinese industrial city with a population of about one million people. As almost everyone was asleep in their beds, instead of outside in the relative safety of the streets, the quake was...

On this day in 1978, National Lampoon’s Animal House, a movie spoof about 1960s college fraternities starring John Belushi, opens in U.S. theaters. Produced with an estimated budget of $3 million, Animal House became a huge, multi-million-dollar box-office hit, spawned a slew of cinematic imitations and became part of pop-culture...

Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley elopes with 17-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on this day, despite the fact that he’s already married.
Shelley, the heir to his wealthy grandfather’s estate, was expelled from Oxford when he refused to acknowledge authorship of a controversial essay. He eloped with his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, the...

Before the electronic microphone became commonplace in the 1920s, the one quality that was required of every professional singer in every musical genre was a talent for vocal projection—i.e., the ability to make oneself heard over one’s instrumental accompaniment in a live or a recorded performance. Bing Crosby and Frank...

On this day in 1929, President John F. Kennedy’s beautiful and popular wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, is born into a prominent New York family.
Jacqueline, or “Jackie” as she was called, grew up an avid horsewoman and reader. In 1951, after graduating from George Washington University, Jackie toured Europe with...

On this day in 1991, Dennis Martinez of the Montreal Expos pitches a perfect game to lead his team to a 2-0 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers. Martinez was the first Latino ever to pitch a perfect game.
When he debuted with the Baltimore Orioles in 1976 at age 21,...

President Lyndon B. Johnson announces that he has ordered an increase in U.S. military forces in Vietnam, from the present 75,000 to 125,000. Johnson also said that he would order additional increases if necessary. He pointed out that to fill the increase in military manpower needs, the monthly draft calls...

In response to Soviet accusations that the United States had conducted a two-month bombing campaign intentionally to destroy the dikes and dams of the Tonkin Delta in North Vietnam, a CIA report is made public by the Nixon administration. The report revealed that U.S. bombing at 12 locations had in...

On July 28, 1914, one month to the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were killed by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, effectively beginning the First World War.
Threatened by Serbian ambition in the tumultuous Balkans region of Europe, Austria-Hungary determined that...

On this day in 1943, the worst British bombing raid on Hamburg so far virtually sets the city on fire, killing 42,000 German civilians.
On July 24, British bombers launched Operation Gomorrah, repeated bombing raids against Hamburg and its industrial and munitions plants. Sortie after sortie dropped fire from the sky,...